PayPal Eyes Bitcoin's Disruptive Potential | Bitcoin | BitPay

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That would be interesting....we pitched PayPal Encryptanet a long time ago as a way to deliver highly fractionable-value cryptography certificates as access to digital content. The only issue was the content providers at the time weren't ready for it. I think things have changed...

No, I think Paypal creating their own virtual currency would be a really good thing.

I think it would specifically be a good thing for content providers too who have been resistant to alternate ways to monetize premium content and stuck in adopting failed premium models over and over again with the same results. The payment providers and content providers keep trying to build and use models that screw the consumer of the digital content. A virtual currency model would tip that back so that the user actually has some say.

So it'd be a *really* good thing for consumers of premium digital content.

Basically no user wants to go through a painful ecommerce checkout every single time they want to consume content, but the payment providers software and business model was set up to not be able to profit enough from really small purchases and process the access. Which brings up the second point, they couldn't split the purchase where making multiple premium accesses were easier without going through the equally painful registration process. Content providers couldn't provide pain-free registration or user identity because 1) they wanted to data mine the user info and anonymous purchase, like buying a newspaper for cash except online that includes no personally identifiable information, goes against all the privacy exploitation they so love, and 2) they were afraid of user sharing as a profit loss.

A bitcoin like virtual currency would take away the splitting the transaction problems and capturing the data problems and tilt it back in favor of the premium content consumer. Content providers and payment providers back then weren't willing to do that, but it seems the market has shifted back where it should be, in favor of the consumer as these companies are even more willing to package content the way users want it and not in the way that makes it easy for them to gang up on the user.